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Monday, December 31, 2012

This year I knocked off 37 books, and 10,842 pages- give or
take. There were three other books I read pretty deeply into, before putting
them on hold, but I won’t be counting those pages towards this year’s total.
That means I averaged about 30 pages per day, compared to 31 pages per day last year. Pretty darn steady, all things considered.

So, what did I read, you ask? Well, I’d throw the vast
majority of it in the classics or contemporary literary fiction category. “Read
the best books first,” and all that jazz… But 14% of those pages were
non-fiction, 11% of them were mainstream commercial fiction, 6% were plays, and
11% were short story collections. More importantly, I reached all my goals for this year, knocking off an Agatha Christie here, conquering a foreign language
read some time before the clock strikes twelve tonight, and ensuring that a
full 44% of my reading this year came from the pens of female writers. (Last
year, you may remember, there was only one.)

Here is the final list, in the order I read them, with my top
ten reads listed in bold (page numbers in parentheses):

Now,
coming up with a top ten is always tough. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Good Earth were reread precisely because they were already favorites of mine. Even so, there were a handful that could have made the cut if I’d been in a slightly different mood when I
read them, but all I can go on is which books I enjoyed the most. Twenty six of those authors were brand new to me, which is exciting and disheartening at the same time. I am tearing through new writers at an amazing clip and am still just scratching the surface. But that's what makes this so much fun.Now it’s time
for you to shame me with your own lists. Whadjyall read this year?

Update: How on earth did I leave On the Road off this list! Not sure who I would bump from the top ten, but Kerouac definitely belongs in that group.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

It
feels like time for another round of these, doesn’t it? I give you the stern,
twin gazes of Jose Saramago and Alan Arkin:

And
when you look at Margaret Atwood, don’t you half expect her to bring the house
down in a Streisandian rendition of “Memories?” (Because I do.)

Then there’s Grace Paley. Keeping it real, no pretension, no
time to brush her hair. She’s just gettin’ stuff done, a la Mrs. Weasley:

And
since we’ve crossed over into the world of fantasy, let’s examine Lord of the Flies author William Golding. He looks a bit like Lord of the Rings hero Gandalf, three months after chemotherapy:

And
this last one I’m not going to call a “look-alike” until someone can prove that
both pictures are in fact not one-and-the-same man. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s
hear it for James Joyce, world-renowned author and banjo-playing contortionist:

Monday, December 24, 2012

When
you stop to think about it, there’s really no better way to put yourself in the
Christmas spirit than to read about poor tenement children having large
Christmas trees flung at them by grown men. So, in that spirit, here is just such a passage from
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty
Smith:

There
was a cruel custom in the neighborhood. It was about the trees still unsold
when midnight of Christmas Eve approached. There was a saying that if you waited
until then, you wouldn’t have to buy a tree; that “they’d chuck ‘em at you.”
This was literally true.

At
midnight on the Eve of our dear Savior's birth, the kids gathered where there
were unsold trees. The man threw each tree in turn, starting with the biggest.
Kids volunteered to stand up against the throwing. If a boy didn’t fall down
under the impact, the tree was his. If he fell, he forfeited his chance at
winning a tree. Only the roughest boys and some of the young men elected to be
hit by the big trees. The others waited shrewdly until a tree came up that they
could stand against. The littlest kids waited for the tiny, foot-high trees and
shrieked in delight when they won one.

On
the Christmas Eve when Francie was ten and Neely nine, mama consented to let
them go down and have their first try for a tree. Francie had picked out her
tree earlier in the day. She had stood near it all afternoon and evening
praying that no one would buy it. To her joy it was still there at midnight. It
was the biggest tree in the neighborhood and its price was so high that no one
could afford to buy it. It was ten feet high. Its branches were bound with new
white rope and it came to a sure pure point at the top.

The
man took this tree out first. Before Francie could speak up, a neighborhood
bully, a boy of eighteen known as Punky Perkins, stepped forward and ordered
the man to chuck the tree at him. The man hated the way Punky was so confident.
He looked around and asked;

”Anybody
else wanna take a chanct on it?”

Francie
stepped forward. “Me, Mister.”

A
spurt of derisive laughter came from the tree man. The kids snickered. A few
adults who had gathered to watch the fun, guffawed.

“Aw
g’wan. You’re too little,” the tree man objected.

“Me
and my brother — we’re not too little together.”

She
pulled Neely forward. The man looked at them — a thin girl of ten with
starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby-round. He looked
at the little boy with his fair hair and round blue eyes - Neeley Nolan, all
innocence and trust.

"Two
ain't fair," yelped Punky.

"Shut
your lousy trap," advised the man who held all the power in that hour.
“These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of youse. These kids is
goin’ to have a show at this tree.”

The
others made a wavering lane. Francie and Neeley stood at one end of it and the
big man with the big tree at the other. It was a human funnel with Francie and
her brother making the small end of it. The man flexed his great arms to throw
the great tree. He noticed how tiny the children looked at the end of the short
lane. For the split part of a moment, the tree thrower went through a kind of
Gethsemane.

“Oh,
Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ‘em the tree, say Merry
Christmas and let ‘em go. What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this
year and it won’t keep till next year." The kids watched him solemnly as
he stood there in his moment of thought. "But then," he rationalized,
if I did that, all the others would expect to get 'em handed to 'em. And next
year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ‘em
handed to ‘em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree
away for nothin’. No, I ain't big enough. I ain't big enough to do a thing like
that. I gotta think of myself and my own kids." He finally came to his
conclusion. "Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live is this world.
They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And
by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned
world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s
a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”

Francie
saw the tree leave his hands. There was a split bit of being when time and
space had no meaning. The whole world stood dark and still as something dark
and monstrous came through the air. The tree came towards her blotting out all
memory of her having lived. There was nothing – nothing but pungent darkness
and something that grew and grew as it rushed at her. She staggered as the tree
hit them. Neeley went down to his knees but she pulled him up fiercely before
he could go down. There was a mighty swishing sound as the tree settled.
Everything was dark, green and prickly. Then she felt a sharp pain at the side
of her head where the trunk of the tree had hit her. She felt Neeley trembling.

When
some of the older boys pulled the tree away, they found Francie and her brother
standing upright, hand in hand. Blood was coming from scratches on Neeley’s
face. He looked more like a baby than ever with his bewildered blue eyes and
the fairness of his skin made more noticeable because of the clear red blood.
But they were smiling. Had they not won the biggest tree in the neighborhood?
Some of the boys hollered “Hooray!” A few adults clapped. The tree man
eulogized them by screaming,

“And
now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.”

Francie
had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no
meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of
inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The
phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in
saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she
smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, Goodbye
– God bless you.”

…They
set the tree up in the front room after spreading a sheet to protect the carpet
of pink roses from falling pine needles. The tree stood in a big tin bucket
with broken bricks to hold it upright. When the rope was cut away, the branches
spread out to fill the whole room. They draped over the piano and it was so
that some of the chairs stood among the branches. There was no money to buy
tree decorations or lights. But the tree standing there was enough. The room
was cold. It was a poor year, that one- too poor for them to buy the extra coal
for the front room stove. The room smelled cold and clean and aromatic. Every
day, during the week the tree stood there, Francie put on her sweater and
zitful cap and went in and sat under the tree. She sat there and enjoyed the
small and the dark greenness of it. Oh, the mystery of a great tree, a prisoner
in a tin was bucket in a tenement front room.

Friday, December 21, 2012

In
an ideal world, I’d have a babysitter all lined up for tonight so that Mrs.
DeMarest and I could go catch the long-awaited movie version of On the Road . Alas, I don’t. And even if
I did, the last movie we saw together was Skyfall, which means we’d probably have
to veer back to the chick flick side of the spectrum on our next outing. So I
may not get to see another literary adaptation this holiday season.

Now,
I did see Life of Pi, but since I’d never read the book, I can’t judge it on
adaptation merits. (Although the opening credits alone are worth your time-
that is one good-looking picture.) Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby was supposed to
be a Christmas time release, but it got bumped to next summer, unfortunately.
And I’m not exactly dying to see Les Miserables- I’ve never read the
book or seen the stage version, and who are we kidding, Susan Boyle has ruined
all other “I Dreamed a Dream” renditions for me, so watching a shaggy-headed
Anne Hathaway belt it out isn’t going to cut muster. As for a singing Russell
Crowe… I’m not sure I’ll ever be up to that (I’m picturing something slightly
worse than Pierce Brosnan’s effort in Mamma Mia.)

That’s
all a very long way of saying that I have really, really been looking forward
to On the Road since I read the book for the first time this past summer. And I’m
bummed that I probably won’t see it until it pops up at my local grocery store’s
Redbox. Ah well… If you happen to have better luck, fellow movie-goer, or even
if you don’t, let us whet your appetite with an On the Road roundup. Here is a smattered
assortment of posts we’ve done on Kerouac’s rambling American masterpiece:

Thursday, December 20, 2012

So
you’ve finished a great book, and the author has left you wanting more. Happens
all the time, right? Like George Costanza, they’ve gone out on a high note.
Well, if you happen to be reading the hottest new sci-fi, YA or fantasy title, you
have options- there’s a whole world of fan fiction out there, where enthusiastic amateurs create sequels, prequels and continuations of the very story and
characters you loved so much.

But
what if you have a bent for the classics?
Out of luck, right? I thought so, too. But not so fast my friend. Check
out the following sub-pages at FanFiction.net:

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

As is usually the case here in Atlanta, we’re
not expecting a white Christmas. This is kind of a bummer for an old mountain
boy like myself, but I know I’m not alone. If your present location is
lattitudinally or altitudinally challenged, you might just have to turn to
literature to get a taste of the white stuff this year. And what book could fit the bill
any better than Edith Wharton’s wintry, New England classic, Ethan Frome ?

I’d
never read Wharton before this year, but my pleasant surprise with George Eliot's Silas Marner - another boring, character-name
title that does a poor job of advertising its contents- inspired me to give Ethan Frome a go. And hey- if Silas Marner can bring the world of the anti-social, cataleptic weaver to life, who am I to
judge the sleep-inducing title of Ethan
Frome ? Maybe it can surprise and delight in the same way.

One
thing’s for sure: the last thing on earth I would have guessed to be hidden
between the covers was the story of a somber sledding tragedy. But that’s
exactly what made it three kinds of awesome. From the very start Wharton makes us
feel sorry for Ethan Frome- sorry for his family situation, sorry for his
missed career and financial troubles, sorry for his being stuck with an
overbearing hypochondriac for a wife, and sorry for having true happiness
dangled temptingly in front of him when he finally meets his unobtainable
soulmate, Mattie.

But
it’s all a heart-wrenching tease. Propriety’s too powerful for these
star-crossed lovers, and they’re forced to go their separate ways. Or are they?
There are hints of a happy resolution, if they’ve only got the guts to make it
happen.

And
it could just be that I’m a pretty daft processor of foreshadowing, but I was
hoping for and predicting the two of them running off together to close out the
story- a happy ending a la Silas Marner. I did not see the "super sledding
suicide pact" coming. That one hit me like the Elm tree that paralyzed Mattie
and disfigured poor old Ethan.

But there you have it. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hadn't yet sung their famous diddy, so all Frome had to go on was Mattie's warped toboggan deathwish: If you can't be with the
one you love, mangle their spinal chord so you can at least have them always nearby.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Edgar
Allen Poe only wrote one full-length novel. The modern reader may not hear much
about it anymore, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t plenty influential in its
day. Baudelaire translated it into French and riffed on it in some of his own
poetry. Jules Verne is said to have greatly admired the book, even penning what
can only be called a “fan-fiction” sequel called An Antarctic Mystery . Henry James alluded to the book in The Golden Bowl and Jorge Luis Borges praised it as Poe’s
greatest work. Moby Dick may have drawn pretty heavily on parts of it, and readers
of Life of Pi (or viewers of the gorgeous new movie by the
same name) may not even realize that the tiger’s name, Richard Parker, is an
homage to Poe’s only novel.

Having
said all that, I can’t remember a book I’ve read in the past couple years whose
ending was so unworthy of its beginning. In reality, it’s kind of impossible to
give Pym a fair reading in this day and age. In the
latter half of the book Poe was postulating about the completely unknown world
of the Antarctic- something even casual modern readers know quite a bit about
nowadays. For this reason, the whole last half of the book fell flat for me.
But the beginning was something else!

This
book started out promising intrigue and adventure, and did a great job
delivering on both counts. Our narrator is secreted away in the inaccessible lower
decks of a ship by his friend, the nephew of the captain. They agree that they
need to wait a certain period of time before exposing their stowaway plan, so
that it becomes impractical to turn back to port. But when the prearranged
period comes and goes with no word at all from the friend, Pym is left in his
stuffy hellhole of a hiding place, having exhausted his supplies of food or
drink and having no clue what’s going on above deck. As the narrator plays out
his mental and physical suffering, we’re treated to some classic Poe-ian angst,
every bit as good as the suffering in the “Tell-tale Heart.”

From
there the story leaps into a classic adventure tale, filled with mutiny, violent
sea storms, starvation, cannibalism and finally, rescue.

And
here’s where I wish I had put the book down. The survivors are rescued by a
boat en route to the Antarctic for the purpose of exploration. (Keep in mind,
no one knew of Antarctica when Poe put his story down on paper.) But what
follows is page after page of sleep-inducing, faux-scientific detail about the flora
and fauna on various islands in the southern seas. Seriously, by the time
you’ve used the word “declivity” for the sixth or seventh time, I think it’s
safe to say your story has come off the rails.

Their
discoveries include a black-skinned, black-teethed race of men, and some fifteen
foot long relative of the polar bear. The crew is eventually slaughtered by
this strange native people, all except for Pym and another man, who continue
south in a dinghy into mysterious, milky-white seas where a giant magical figure
appears out of nowhere and brings the book to a close.

Really,
that’s how it ends. I guess if I had picked up the book when it was published
in 1838, and the Antarctic region was still as unknown to Poe’s readers as some
distant planets are to us, it might have fared a little better in my judgment.
As it is, though, I can only say that Poe started out strong, then put me to
sleep, then woke me up and repeatedly jumped the proverbial shark.

Monday, December 17, 2012

"While Katie was arguing
with the movers, Johnny took Francie up to the roof. She saw a whole new world.
Not far away was the the lovely span of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across the
East River, like a fairy city made of silver cardboard, the skyscrapers loomed
cleanly. There was the Brooklyn Bridge further away like an echos of the nearer
bridge.

“It’s
pretty,” said Francie. “It’s pretty the same way pictures of in-the-country are
pretty.”

“I go
over that bridge sometimes when I go to work,” Johnny said.

Francie
looked at him in wonder. He went over that magic bridge and still talked and
looked like always? She couldn’t get over it. She put her hand out and touched
his arm. Surely the wonderful experience of going over that bridge would make
him feel different. She was disappointed because his arm felt as it had always
felt.

Friday, December 14, 2012

We’ve
“diagnosed” Dean Moriarty here, and the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog looked at
his (Neal Cassady’s) literary influence a couple days ago. But if you followed
the links to the YouTube videos in that second article, you got a real treat: rare
footage of Cassady at his manic best. See for yourself:

Thursday, December 13, 2012

We don’t often talk politics here, but I know
some of you writer-types are still smarting from the recent election.

No, no, no, not the
U.S. Presidential election, I’m talking about the recent elections in Spain-
and Catalonia in particular- which looked like it might finally be headed
toward secession from the Kingdom of Spain.

See, earlier this year
the Convergence and Unity party, which has ruled Catalonia for the past couple
decades, finally made the switch from championing greater autonomy for
Catalonia within Spain, to outright support for a referendum on
Independence (a majority of Catalans support Independence). Of course, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the central
government in Madrid have said they will do anything necessary to block
such an action, which sounds kind of like the makings of another Spanish Civil
War, does it not?

Now, as we’ve said
elsewhere, we would obviously never hope for war. But could a modern Catalan independence
movement be the springboard for a new generation of writers, just as the
Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was for
Hemingway, Orwell, Dos Passos, Gellhorn, Garcia Lorca and countless others?

We may never know.
Arthur Mas and the Convergence and Unity party actually lost seats in the
November 25th election. Other pro-independence parties gained new seats, but it was not the clear mandate that Senor Mas was looking for.
Would-be writers may have to look to Scotland’s upcoming independence vote, or
hope for Quebec to bristle again under the harsh oppression of Mother Canada.

Or, they could just
write their stuff anyway. Also a possibility, I guess.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

This was a rare (for me) excursion into the world of
non-fiction- only my second all year. I guess I’m sort of weird that way: I want
my fiction to be believable, and solidly based in reality, but I want my
non-fiction to be lyrical and impactful without blatent preaching. Having loved
Krakauer’s Into the Wild , (and giving
in to my obsession with adventure tales of all types) I thought this one might
just fit the bill. It certainly did.

This fast-reading, but deftly-turned book is a firsthand
account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster. It’s a book that will have you
dreaming of reaching the summit at the same time it convinces you that you’d just
as likely be one of the poor saps who finds an early grave there every year.
(Ten lost their lives in 2012 alone.)

Like an intricate thriller, Krakauer’s story will have you
replaying insignificant early events in your head, as you learn how they became
anything but insignificant to the various climbers and
guides trapped on the mountain. It’s a book filled with the kind survival stories
that would have you rolling your eyes in disbelief if it were a work of fiction.
Knowing that it’s not, though, you’ll be sucked into the account, coughing up pink
sputum with all the other altitude-stricken climbers and pulling for them to
get back to their tents when all hell breaks loose.

As a work of literature, it’s not going to bowl anyone over,
but it will transport you to a place you’ll likely never see.
And that right there is worth the price of admission. Check it out:

Friday, December 7, 2012

In
January I set a goal of reading a great work of Slovene literature this year.
Easy enough right? Except that I vowed to read it in the original Slovene. Uh,
yeah… ever so slightly tougher- even if I happen to speak the language. So as
December neared I was not surprised to find myself just short of finishing this
goal. Okay, okay. Just short of starting it, actually.

So
I picked up my chosen volume, a relatively slender, contemporary novel by Boris Pahor- and then quickly put the project on hold. You see, like most people with
work and family responsibilities, I tend to do a lot of my reading in bed. The disadvantage
to this is that a tough read gets even tougher since my brain is absolutely shredded
by the time the kids fall asleep. The one advantage I have is that I can tackle
a work of Slovene literature with my wife, a native speaker, right beside me.
So I began to pepper her with questions.

You
can take a guess how pleasant that was for her, as she tried to read her own
books (in English, coincidentally.) So, after being asked to “read the whole
sentence” and provide some context for my repeated questions, we both end up
frustrated. So, undaunted, I tried the dictionary route.

Unfortunately,
there are few things as agonizingly slow as flipping through a dictionary in
search of a word whose correct original ending you have to first deduce
because, ya know, every noun has a gender and the noun’s ending (and its adjective’s
ending) changes depending on which of the six cases and three numbers is used
(yes, Slovene has declensions and verb conjugations for singular, plural and
dual- they’re overachievers that way.) And at the end of all of that,
you might find that the word is part of an idiom that isn’t listed in your
typical dictionary, so I then have to flip through my Slovene/English
dictionary of idioms to get the true intended meaning.

I
am a patient man. But I’m not that patient. So then I considered just reading the book cold, and seeing if things would clear up over time. If I read in Slovene, I can generally grasp between 60 and 75% of it, depending on the difficulty of
the writing. And while that’s pretty good for your average American, it’s
absolutely maddening to someone like me, who cannot allow himself to skip a
single word when I read a book in English. Letting 25% or more of a text float
by me is extremely unnerving, and I’m extremely quick to give it up- which is
what I did.

But
the goal still nagged me. It was a worthy aspiration, and one that wasn’t so
much difficult as it was time-consuming. So, it seemed a pity to let it get the
best of me. I took a step back and came up with a new strategy: I would find another
book, with an English translation, and try the old side-by-side method until I
got into a good flow. After running through an entire book that way, I would
return to my Pahor novel (for which there
is no English translation), and see
if I couldn’t nudge my contextual understanding from a pitiful 60%, to something closer to
90%. That, I think, I could live with.

End
result? TBD. I still have 25 days before time runs out, and I’m already 100
pages into Michael Crichton’s Congo (as well as Michael Crichton’s Kongo .) I started out with paragraph by
paragraph comparisons, and have since graduated to section by section
comparisons. If I’m tired, I read the English first, but I am getting more
comfortable and picking more things up through context when I try to tackle the
Slovene first. After another 200 pages, perhaps I’ll really be ready to tackle
the Pahor.

Anyone
else tried this? Any other advice/methods/warnings/encouragement you would
share? Go right ahead.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Remember that time when Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley, Dylan
Thomas, Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll and T.E.
Lawrence all got to together with a few friends and held a giant photoshoot?

Yeah, well, the project that gave birth to that motley gathering
kicked off forty six years ago today. Above is the shot that finally landed on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Can you find the
writers named above? No? Me neither. (I could only find five without the help of a key.) But see below for all the writerly call-outs:

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Georgia fans might be a little bitter after
losing to Alabama in the SEC Championship the other night, but let’s face it,
this bad blood is nothing new. Even the world of literature has not been immune
to the effects of this southern rivalry.

When Bama belle Harper
Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird to great acclaim in 1960, Georgia girl Carson
McCullers reportedly wrote the following to her cousin: "Well,
honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves." (Hiss! Reer!)

And another female Georgian author,
Flannery O’Connor, tried a more subtle “bless her heart” back-handed compliment
of Lee: "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting
that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's
book. Somebody ought to say what it is."

Monday, December 3, 2012

I doubt I would have
picked up Roland Barthes’ Mythologies
, if I hadn’t loved the heck out of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
But I did, so... I did.

Still,
I feared I was headed for some hoity-toity philosophy text that I would find extremely
hard-to-follow. Imagine my surprise when the first essay jumps right into the seedy
world of professional wrestling. He makes some great points about how the petty bourgeois spectacle of wrestling is just the latest evolution of ancient Greek
theater:

“There
are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a
sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled
performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or
Andromaque [Barthes here refers to characters in neo-classic French plays by
Molière and Racine]. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the
participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight;
this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is
performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself
to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban
cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a
stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The
public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or
not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle,
which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what
it thinks but what it sees.”

Now,
I once paid hard-earned money to see the Undertaker and the Ultimate Warrior clash in a
so-called “Body Bag Match” in 1991, so this could just be me justifying my
junior high dalliances, but I think there’s definitely some truth in what Barthes
is saying- maybe wrestling isn't so much about maintaining a veneer of believability, but fills some deeper human need instead.